Amaury Sechet’s Privacy Concerns With Cashaccount

Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Sechet took to Twitter recently, proclaiming that the new BCH-powered alias-address system Cashaccount will be a privacy disaster. Surprisingly, Cashaccount creator Jonathan Silverblood agreed with Sechet, as the founder believes his project will lead to more BCH users reusing Bitcoin addresses. This would be bad for privacy, as reused addresses can be used to discover financial information that users may not wish to disclose.

I agree – it will undoubtedly increase the number of people that will reuse addresses.

Perhaps you can spend some time and help get those stealth keys that @ChrisPacia was working on more widely supported, or help progress the BIP-47 support?

— Jonathan Silverblood (@monsterbitar) January 3, 2019

To resolve the potential lack of privacy, Silverblood asked Sechet to collaborate with Openbazaar developer Chris Pacia on stealth keys, or to assist with the development of BIP-47.

However, other commentators like Crypto Pelé were not as concerned with a lack of privacy. Pelé pointed out that some BCH users are fine with the transparency that comes with reusing addresses.

Erik Voorhees Defends Brian Armstrong From Criticism

To commemorate Bitcoin’s 10th year anniversary of the Genesis Block, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted a series of tweets reminiscing how he first got into bitcoin.

1/ Today is a big day for Bitcoin, as it marks 10 years since the Genesis Block. Some people think I don’t like to talk about Bitcoin (), but today I have a few words to say

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) January 3, 2019

In the thread, Armstrong recounts reading the Bitcoin white paper in 2010 and becoming obsessed about Bitcoin for the subsequent 6 months. He began building a bitcoin wallet for Android devices as a side project, but then pivoted to a hosted wallet and a custom Bitcoin node. After securing funding from Ycombinator, Armstrong started working on his business idea full time and settled on the company name Coinbase. He then ended the tweet-storm on a positive note, boldly proclaiming that he has “never had more conviction” on the future of cryptocurrencies.

Not everyone responded positively to Armstrong’s tweets. Commentator Simon Moon called Armstrong out for being a fake libertarian, arguing that Coinbase is a government-backed monopoly.

Hah… as if their business just “appeared” and had a moat of regulation around it. The regulation isn’t their fault, and they have to walk a very delicate line. Yet millions enter the ecosystem because of the tools (read: bridge) that CoinBase has built.

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) January 4, 2019

Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees quickly stepped in to defend Coinbase’s CEO. Voorhees pointed out that regulation was not Coinbase’s fault and that Coinbase has helped introduce millions of people to cryptocurrency.

1 Billion Outputs on the BTC Blockchain

Blockchair lead developer Nikita Zhavoronkov also took to social media to wish Bitcoin a happy 10th birthday. While many congratulated Bitcoin on it’s Genesis Block, Zhavoronkov took the opportunity to congratulate Bitcoin for creating 1 billion outputs on the BTC blockchain.

Not only it’s the 10th Bitcoin birthday today, but also a new landmark has been achieved — now there are more than 1 billion outputs created on the Bitcoin blockchain (see //t.co/bKMI1xgYsf for stats) — what an interesting coincidence! pic.twitter.com/jeWJwLkVQ1

— Nikita Zhavoronkov (@nikzh) January 3, 2019

What do you think of privacy issues surrounding the Cashaccount’s identification system? Let us know in the comments below.